zisis's Music Gear Setup

This is my first guitar and I have it for ten years now!

The fact that it works perfectly after all this time says everything. It's very well made and comfortable. For beginners it's the best so far because i found the neck to be the perfect size to build your style and practice your fingers to cover space on the frets.

The only cons is that i would give it a small setup. You will need to change the nut and the machine-heads. If you want to have a better sound you can change the pickups as well because they are ceramic and might sound a little bit muddy and... you know, pretty decent.

It's not very heavy on weight and you can play many different styles with it. I'm not going to give away mine, after replacing the pickups it sounds way better and like a more expensive guitar. I'll use it for studio and shows as well \m/

These strings have the best balance I found so far.

I used to buy a different brand each month, when i would change strings on my guitar so in that way i would know what is out there and what's the best for me. I came with Rotosound when I used to use 9-42 and I liked them. After trying many other brands and advancing to 10-46 i choose Rotosound as my main strings.

The tension is a little bit higher than other brands which i like because i'm playing hard and they are more bright. I never liked smooth sounding strings, to be honest. Bright ones can " sing " better. They don't rust so fast and they keep their sound even by playing every single day for a couple of weeks.

The best thing is that they come with an extra e string and that's a huge benefit. They never broke to me but in case you have a reserve!

The fact I'm using a low budget guitar made me to want to search for a certain budget pickup to add some more color and, obviously, make it sound way better than the stock ones.

The pickups on Epiphone Les Paul Special II are 650R humbucker for the neck and 700T humbucker for the bridge. The sound of both is decent. And the neck can be muddy. I wanted to upgrade the sound and I decided to not spend more than what I gave for this guitar (which I really love and I'm very grateful for the construction).

I came up with IronGear pickups and after watching many videos on YouTube and reading reviews around the forums i said to try the Tesla Shark for the bridge, since i use mostly the bridge to play.

The sound is amazing! They have Alnico 2 magnets and the sound is more bright and creamy which is a very good combination. I don't have any issues with the output since it's medium and you can even get this punchy tone you're looking for. They work very well with aggressive sounds from an amp (like JTM45 or Silver Jubilee) and they can work so much well when playing hard rock and such. I really like them.

The price is very affordable. Maybe the shipping can be an issue but they came to me (i don't live in UK where they are shipped from) within three days, during Christmas! That says a lot.

Keep in mind to have them as much close to your strings as you can (but not so close that can affect the tuning and such) because of the mid-output Alnico II gives and all I can say is that my guitar sounds way better and i'm impressed that they come close to the original Alnico 2 from other companies.

I will definitely go with IronGear again when i'll replace the neck pickup and for future guitar upgrades!